There’s such a massive mess of space junk floating around the planet that scientists now say it could ruin their view of the stars.
A long-defunct “grandfather” satellite ERS-2 fell to Earth Wednesday in a push to reduce low-orbit space junk — but it barely made a dent in the problem, with so many thousands of pieces of debris experts say could might rocket launches dangerous and one day create rings made of scrap around the planet.
There are about 25,000 objects at least the size of a softball orbiting Earth and more than 100 million even smaller objects, according to NASA. With 9,000 metric tons of junk in the sky that can travel up to 10 times the speed of a bullet, rocket and equipment launches could become disastrous, officials warn.
Even a tiny piece of debris hurtling through space at upwards of 23,000 miles an hour could crack a window in the International Space Station, experts said.
More than 5,000 of the larger objects are satellites belonging to SpaceX, which had applied to add another 30,000 Starlink satellites to the mix in recent years.
The orbiting dump of uncontrolled space trash has caused astronomers to worry that light pollution is interrupting their telescopic views of the night sky and compromising their ability to make new discoveries, according to a 2023 Guardian report.
There is also concern that increased satellites will cause radio interference with sensitive astronomical instruments.
An animation made by the US Combined Space Operations Center’s Space Surveillance Network shows just how crowded space has gotten above the atmosphere since the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.
The dots representing space debris surrounding the planet are not to scale, but “the congestion worsens each year,” according to NASA officials.
Scientists have theorized that eventually Earth will have its own visible rings, but instead of small chunks of ice and space rocks like some other planets, these will be made of space debris.
“We can see the fingerprint of human space traffic on stratospheric aerosol,” Troy Thornberry, a research physicist at NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory, told CNN Wednesday.
“Adding a lot of material to the stratosphere that was never there before is something that we’re considering, as well as the sheer mass of material that we put into space.”
Ten percent of the particles in the upper atmosphere have bits of metal from rockets or satellites disintegrating, according to an October report published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America journal.
That startling figure was expected to shoot up to 50% as humans become even more dependent on satellites, according to the report.
With climate change on the Earth’s surface already amounting to a worldwide crisis, a new commercial space race fueled by kerosene is producing tons of new destructive emissions with every launch and disintegration, experts cautioned.
“We’re talking about constellations of thousands of satellites that each weigh a ton or so, and when they come down they’re acting like meteoroids,” Thornberry reportedly said.
The trash traffic jam has renewed fears of “Kessler Syndrome,” a theory that Earth’s orbit will become so crowded that debris will just keep colliding, making any launches potentially fraught with disaster.
Ron Lopez, president of the US branch of Astroscale, a Japanese company competing for market share in the emerging field of orbital debris removal, told CNN that a decade ago people thought “our founder was crazy for even talking about space debris.
“Now you can’t go to a space conference without a panel or a series of talks on space sustainability and the debris issue,” Lopez said.
“In the Gold Rush, it was the folks that made the pickaxes and the shovels that often did better than the prospectors,” he continued. “And in a sense, that’s exactly what we’re bringing to the market,” he said, while acknowledging the company was a long way from launching outer space garbage trucks and recycling centers.
ESR-2’s homecoming went off without a hitch, however. As predicted, surviving pieces of the bus-sized satellite landed in a remote body of water. Officials had said the odds of debris from the object hitting a person were one in a billion.